1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of e-mail messaging and more particularly to hidden recipient management for e-mail messaging.
2. Description of the Related Art
A variety of electronic messaging systems have arisen which range from real-time instant messaging systems and wireless text pagers to asynchronous electronic mail systems. Electronic mail, a form of electronic messaging referred to in the art as e-mail, has proven to be the most widely used computing application globally. Though e-mail has been a commercial staple for several decades, due to the explosive popularity and global connectivity of the Internet, e-mail has become the preferred mode of communications, regardless of the geographic separation of communicating parties.
E-mail applications allow users to compose and send e-mail to different users, in addition to forwarding e-mails that have been received to other designated recipients. It is common for e-mails to be redistributed several times to many different recipients. As such, there may be times when a user intends to conceal the e-mail address of the sender but not the content of a message when forwarding an e-mail. Likewise, a recipient of a mass-distributed e-mail may not find comfort in others viewing the e-mail address of the recipient in the addressable fields of the mass-distributed e-mail—especially when the others are not known personally to the recipient.
Conventional methods of concealing the identity of an e-mail addressee include protecting the identity of the sender by manually removing the original name of the sender and e-mail address of the sender from the body of the e-mail before redistributing the e-mail. Also, to protect the identity of the recipient, every e-mail address for a corresponding recipient can be manually placed in the blind carbon copy (BCC) address field instead of the “TO” field. When using the BCC address field, the identity of the recipients in the BCC address field will be hidden from view from other addressees.
Message replies can be handled in different ways where an address has been blind carbon copied. In some e-mail systems, a reply to an e-mail message with a blind carbon copied addressee will not be directed to the blind carbon copied addressee. In other e-mail systems, exactly the opposite is true. In the former circumstance, it can be convenient not to exclude a blind carbon copied addressee from a complete thread of discussion associated with the e-mail message. However, in the latter circumstance, the confidentiality associated with a message can be compromised because the responding party will not necessarily have knowledge of all recipients receiving the reply to the e-mail message.